Senior A2A Risk Architect — Payments Platform

Mastercard; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Mastercard is seeking a Principal Product Architect for its Account-to-Account (A2A) Risk Solutions team in London. The role focuses on designing scalable architectures for fraud and financial crime solutions, aligning with business goals and regulatory requirements.

Collaborate with product, engineering, data science and external partners to shape the technology strategy, drive deployment models, and ensure resilience across global markets.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing enterprise-scale, high-volume, low-latency distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of API design, governance and industry standards, including OpenAPI.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures, microservices, containers, orchestration platforms and event-driven systems.
• Expertise in DevOps practices, CI/CD and modern software delivery methodologies.
• Experience with streaming platforms, NoSQL technologies and large-scale data processing.
• Understanding of machine learning deployment and production environments.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to engage technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Proven ability to balance business requirements with technical constraints and architectural trade-offs.
• Experience making technology decisions across architecture, databases, platforms and development frameworks.
• Knowledge of data protection approaches including tokenization and anonymization.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain solution architectures that align with business objectives, product requirements and architectural principles.
• Translate business, customer and market requirements into scalable, secure and resilient technical designs.
• Lead architecture for A2A fraud and financial crime solutions, ensuring adaptability across global and regional implementations.
• Define and govern API standards, integration approaches and service interactions.
• Design reusable architecture patterns and deployment models that accelerate market onboarding and customer integration.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, data science and delivery teams to support planning, estimation and execution.
• Partner with third-party technology providers to develop integration strategies and manage architectural dependencies.
• Drive technology evaluations, software selection and architectural decision-making.
• Identify opportunities to improve performance, scalability, resilience and operational efficiency.
• Shape the technology roadmap, including cloud strategy, data architecture, APIs, operational resilience and platform evolution.
• Act as a technical advisor to customers, financial institutions and internal stakeholders, communicating architecture, deployment options and implementation trade-offs.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and industry trends that can strengthen fraud detection, decisioning capabilities and platform scalability.
• Ensure solutions comply with Mastercard standards and relevant regulatory requirements.

Skills

Distributed systems

API design

Cloud-native architectures

DevOps

Data streaming

ML deployment

Stakeholder communication

Architecture leadership

Decision making

TOGAF

Tools

OpenAPI

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Containers

Job description

Mastercard is seeking a Principal Product Architect for its Account-to-Account (A2A) Risk Solutions team in London. The role focuses on designing scalable architectures for fraud and financial crime solutions, aligning with business goals and regulatory requirements.

Collaborate with product, engineering, data science and external partners to shape the technology strategy, drive deployment models, and ensure resilience across global markets.